Reflecting on MacArthur's 'The Truth War'

Close your eyes,
For your eyes will only tell the truth,
And the truth isn't what you want to see,
In the dark it is easy to pretend,
But the truth is what it ought to be.

'The Music of the Night' in Phantom of the Opera

Studying the humanities and social sciences at undergraduate level has made me realise that an essential conceptual basis an undergraduate must grasp is that the world is an illusion. The anthropologists call the manifestations of such illusion 'portrayals', the geographers call them 'geographical imagination' or 'images', the anti-Whorfist linguists and the philosophers call it the betrayal of ousia (essence). The baseline echoes the Phantom's claim, 'The truth isn't what you want to see'.

Rising above academia, it is important for all Christians to know that in our world right now, the seeds of postmodernism have also grown and taken root in the Church. Postmodernist interpretations of our faith naturally implicates the Emerging Church Movement, which according to OpenSourceTheology, is a 'dissatisfaction that has often been explained in terms of a perceived shift in the wider culture from modernism to postmodernism: from objectivism to relativism, from certainty to doubt, from singularity to plurality, from Story to stories'. Christianity Today, a leading magazine for the Emerging Church, explains why postmodernism is embraced (and therefore leading to the Movement) - 'the collapse of inherited metanarratives (overarching explanations of life)' because they are demode, they have concretised our view of God and our faith so much so we are harmed by the 'impossibility of getting outside their assumptions'. Core time-weathered doctrines (which were sometimes at the expense of martyr-blood) that have always been laid out in Reformed faith is under attack, because these core doctrines and basic principles of our faith are seen to have fossilised our understanding of the unfathomable God.

MacArthur repeatedly emphasises the amorphousness of the Emerging Church Movement. It's like Gnosticism in its heydays - there were many different interpretations and opinions that it is hard to lump this plethora into a particular movement. Scot McKnight, being an insider of the Emerging Church Movement, highlights the heterogenous nature of the Movement. He classifies Emerging believers into those who

(1) minister to postmoderns,
(2) work with postmoderns, and
(3) work as postmoderns.

Emerging believers from categories (1) and (2) 'don't deny truth, they don't deny that Jesus Christ is truth, and they don't deny the Bible is truth'.
Those from (3) 'embrace the idea that we cannot know absolute truth, or, at least, that we cannot know truth absolutely'.

Despite the multifarious nature of the Movement, the baseline is 'uncertainty is the new truth' (MacArthur 2007:16-23). It is not the denial of truth itself - Emerging believers do accept the Bible as the true Word of God. The bone of contention is how this truth is interpreted. Because of the emphasis on personal experience and spiritual intimacy with God, along with the postmodernist idiosyncracy to challenge the structured and those in authority, the interpretation of the Bible is seen to be 'intuitive' and personal, as MacArthur explains it on a GraceToYou interview with Phil Johnson. Now this explains why I sometimes find it hard to explain the antithetical, dichotomous nature of the Bible to an Emerging believer. I believe this sentiment is shared by many. The black-and-whites are deliberately transformed into gray areas.

At ministry level, such amorphousness translates into lay church people self-declaring, self-inventing a 'new' Christian faith that has never been discovered because of overpowering metanarratives. Of course, not all Emerging leaders are, but MacArthur writes that there is an increasing entrance of these people 'with strong entrepreneurial skills and weak exegetical skills' who are 'grossly unprepared for ministry'. The strict prerequisites for church leaders, such as being able to 'keep hold of the deep truths of faith' (I Timothy 3:9), are increasingly flouted. Judgment starts from the house of the Lord. Spiritual leaders and teachers have been held accountable by God, such as in God's wrath to the priests during Hosea's time, and will continue to be held so. And this is why I find it weird that speakers invited to give messages during some services I attended end up giving academic lecture akin to coffee-shop talk, or 'How-to's on corporate achievement and the pursuit of worldly pleasure. Sometimes an unconvincing conclusion is made with reference to Bible verses. At other times, the service ironically becomes a man-centred seminar. Is the responsibility of shepherding God's flocks so callously brushed aside in the celebration of human individuality?

I've been thinking to myself though, what's wrong about tailoring to culture? Paul says, 'I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the Gospel' (I Corinthians 9:22-23). Christ also mingled and feasted with the shunned class of people during His time. He spent time interacting with tax collectors, prostitutes and adulterous women and other sinful people so as to save them. If we practice too much biblical separation, aren't we deliberately flouting the Great Commission, to be a salt and light unto the world? We would live in a hermetically sealed world where only Christians exist.

MacArthur expounds on Paul's principles to become 'all things to all men', that it does not entail overriding biblical principles, which teach us to live in the way and glory of God. To become all things to all men, is to avoid stumbling others (MacArthur 2007:167). Putting it into context, Paul had been clarifying the issues of legal persecution among believers, marriage and food offerings to idols - the definition of what is sinful and what is not is based on not wounding the conscience of weaker believers (I Corinthians 8:12). 'He was not saying he adapted the Gospel message' (MacArthur 2007:167), and rightly so. If not, why was he always landing up in trouble and near-death persecution encounters? He did not tailor the Gospel to the people of Athens, nor at Thessalonica, Rome or before King Agrippa. And if we improvise on the Gospel, for example, being purposely oblivious to the necessity of preaching Christ's lordship in evangelism, or by not pointing out our utterly filthy state that desperately calls for repentance, are we doubting the power of the Gospel? Such concerns cannot be ignored if we want to be witnesses for Christ, especially when Christ's lordship and sin seem to be so unpalatable in our postmodernist society that extremely tolerates differences.

Biblical examples have not shown how testifying for God involved compromise on the core doctrines and was still blessed and seen as pleasing in the eyes of our Almighty God. Afterall, culture is always changing, full of its fads in every aspect (fashion, religion, intellectual work...) Tailoring to those who are in the postmodern culture necessarily excludes others. For example, tailoring to the youths means the older generations are not 'tailored' to. And a few generations down the road, youths who once embraced the Emerging Church Movement would be calling it obsolete, because the mentality revolves around the 'global reshaping of how to "do church" in postmodern culture' (MacKnight 2007). There exists a discontent with what is structured.

It is also worthy to highlight some dangers of the Emerging Church Movement.

Condoning homosexuality in the Church, hallmarked by the appointment of an admitted, practicing homosexual as a bishop in America's Episcopal Church in 2006.
Romans 1 says men and women have 'abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men' (v27). This act is deliberate, as contrary to the unconvincing determinist view of 'gay genes in the blood': 'Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.'

The 'repainting' of the Christian faith, such as Joseph Prince's Destined to Reign that claims that Christians don't have to engage in spiritual warfare, and abandoning core doctrines such as substitionary atonement that Steve Chalkes calls 'a cosmic child abuse' by the God of love in The Lost Message of Jesus. At macro-level, it's the embracing of other religions in the Ecumenical Movement that paves way for the Anti-Christ's reign in end times.
When 'repainting' means the embracing of everyone's interpretation of our God, there is no yardstick on what is correct. But Jay Adams points out that the Bible centralises on antithesis:

From the Garden of Eden with its two trees (one allowed, one forbidden) to the eternal destiny of the human being in heaven or in hell, the Bible sets forth two, and only two, ways: God's way, and all others. (in MacArthur 2007:195)

The core doctrines of faith - those that concern our salvation, God's authority and the authority of the Bible - are set out in sheer clarity. John echoes this dichotomy: 'If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.' (I John 2:15) But by questioning the authority of the Bible, these truths are interpreted as not being utterly authoritative, even though they may be presented clearly in antithetical fashion. Revelation thus requires more reliance on personal revelation and intuition that 'the Holy Spirit has said'. What has been made clear is deliberately encoded into mystified human products. Rob Bell says, in another issue of Christianity Today, "The Bible is still in the center for us, but it's a different kind of center. We want to embrace mystery, rather than conquer it."

But God has given us the Holy Spirit so that we may understand God's Word, don't we? Paul explicitly wrote that there is mystery no more.

We speak of God's secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began...God has revealed it to us by His Spirit.
I Corinthians 1:7, 10

So why encode mystery that has been unravelled, especially when it implicates the emphasis on personal revelation that purposely ignores the absolute authority of God's Word? Moreover, mystifying our faith can stumble believers. Kristen Bell says, "I grew up thinking that we've figured out the Bible, that we knew what it means. Now I have no idea what most of it means. And yet I feel like life is big again—like life used to be black and white, and now it's in color." Hebrews, however, says that a believer matures from spiritual infancy by learning the Word of God, 'who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil' (5:14). The Bereans exercised their knowledge of Scripture daily too. God gives wisdom and spiritual growth to those who adhere to His Word, learning to discern using God's compass. To claim that the study of God's Word - our source of common, explicit revelation, has abruptly become futile is to deny God's promise that we grow closer to Him by knowing more about Him through His Word.

It is easy to create the 'other', as Edward Said says, because of a group's want to reinforce self identity. I'm not from an Emerging church, but I have friends who left non-Emerging churches for Emerging ones because they find they find that the former becomes legalistic. The Emerging churches capitalise on the downs of 'traditional' churches, which attracts what MacArthur calls the 'marginally churched'. The inference here is not how Emerging churches seem to be 'better' because they are not legalistic at all. The July 9, 2006 issue of Los Angeles Times even published an article that said churches that have 'blurred doctrine and softened moral precepts are demographically declining' (in MacArthur 2007:169). What calls for attention is, in order to contend earnestly for our faith (and thus grow in our knowledge of truth), it is natural and also obliging that we grow in love because we know more of truth. Otherwise, the faith is dead. We have the blessed assurance and faith in core doctrines that anchor our faith in the ever-changing world. Do we treasure it like how we treasure God, its master, learning and living it with great care and zeal?

"Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into Him"
Ephesians 4:14-15